Hello everyone:

There’s a good way to finish the term …and a really stupid one.

Let’s say you are in an 8-week or 16-week course. You have turned in all of your assignments, for better or for worse. You know that your grade hinges on that very last assignment. So what do you do?

Instead of giving it your all, being all-in on this class, or just doing your level best to complete the assignment, you decide to purchase your final document.  Poor choice, bad idea, what are you, stupid or something?

You have worked so hard all semester long and now you are going to blow it in one fell swoop???? You are going to trash your academic reputation? You are willing to have “plagiarism” follow you around for the rest of your academic career? Come on, people. Don’t do it.

In the first place, your instructor was not born yesterday. Yes, we really do notice if your writing suddenly improves by a 200% leap. If a student has trouble writing simple sentences all semester long, do you really think we are going to believe that you wrote : “I have included an in-depth contract with information attached that explicates all relevant esoteric sources?” (Please note that I have re-worded this sentence only slightly, so that the student can’t get me for plagiarism, but the three biggest words really were used in the paper.)

In the second place, most online documents do not fit into the required components for a given assignment. This means that you will look foolish at trying to shoehorn a document you have “borrowed without attribution” into the requirements of an assignment.

Finally, we are wiling to work with you to make sure that you have the right document written. I give students two rough drafts on the final big-deal assignment, just to make sure they get it right. Other than writing it for you, what more could we do?

Here’s the bottom line: be honest in your dealings or you will have a lot of explaining to do about the “failure due to plagiarism” note on your transcript. You probably won’t be able to explain your way out of that one, so the bottom line is: DON’T CHEAT!

Best,

Dr. Sheri